Bharti goes to Bollywood

Bharti Airtel, India’s largest telecom service provider, on Thursday entered the media and entertainment segment with the launch of a digital media exchange. Bollywood movies and TV Serials are among the content that will be distributed through the exchange.

The company will use its existing nationwide telecom infrastructure, satellite services (Bharti is the largest VSAT service provider in India) and submarine cable to distribute digital content both locally and globally.

Currently, there are about 16,000 cinema halls in the country. Out of which nearly 2,000 are digitised. However, Bollywood movies are not released digitally in these Cinema halls as there are no big companies in this field. Bharti Airtel hopes to target this market.

The company is also entering into Teleport services through which it will offer content gathering and distribution services to television channels. This would also include complete content management services such as playout, archival, collocation and storage.

Besides, Airtel will also offer content producers an integrated content delivery and aggregation platform that can repackage content for all formats.